This Old Neon Forum

Over the two-week break, I finished Horizon's Gate and picked up Metaphor ReFantazio.

Overall really enjoyed Horizon's Gate. The final sequence was just a little too hard (perhaps more grinding/exploring was expected, I think I'd explored ~60% of the map) so I turned down the difficulty a bit to compensate.

Metaphor has been great so far. I appreciate the ways it refines the standard Persona formula:
1 - A somewhat more mature story, with possible actual political commentary this time!
2 - Time management is at least reputed to be more forgiving
3 - A modified Press turn system instead of the One-more / All-out mechanics
4 - Streamlined dungeon crawling

I'm not a big fan of the creepy designs/menu/etc, and its pacing is pretty slow (comparable to Personas so far - completed the first real dungeon at ~10hr).

Getting ~35 hours into Metaphor has made me glad I didn't try out the P3 Remake as I'd expect to be even more turned off by that.

While I still appreciate it for most reasons in my previous post, some of the dungeons and enemies are baffling. 90% of the enemies are easy-ish, but I just had an encounter where, unexpectedly, an enemy created 4 spare turns for itself and spent them alternating between almighty (AKA unblockable) and spell (I think wind) damage to my full party, doing 400+ damage even without weaknesses and wiping me out from full HP.

I'm on Normal difficulty, and visual/historical indications on this type of enemy indicate it's weak to light (it's not) or fire (it's not) so I wasn't prepared for this one.

While the ability to assign archetypes (Persona equivalents) to my full party is greatly appreciated, I really wanted a Persona 1-style "persona shift" mid battle for this fight as there are simply too many damage types to try and cover.

Oh well, autosave at least dropped me one floor down so I'm okay, just a bit miffed.

I've also been playing Ember Knights off and on, over the past 8 months or so. A major patch and DLC came out, and I was up for $10 for more of the same and it's been a blast playing it with the kids (even if it's twice as fast playing on my own). While I posted about it earlier, I'm still really enjoying it, especially with the larger weapon/relic variety. One of the DLC weapons does seem overpowered so far, but maybe I just haven't tapped the full potential of the starter weapons (only fully upgraded two so far).

In even-more-casual-land, we've played a bit of Mario Party Jamboree as a family and that's been a good deal of fun. It feels like a happy medium between Superstars (IMO a little too conservative in its changes from MP1-3) and Super Mario Party (which adds some interesting strategies). Jamboree might actually skew things too much towards minigame skill - the allies can be really powerful (and are given to the player who wins a longer minigame - with a handicap given to the player that reached the ally first). I'm still hoping for a fast mode and more configurability around allies, but there's good board and minigame variety. I do wish unlocks (characters and boards) were gated behind points rather than achievements - playing the single player modes to unlock the last board is looking like it'll be a chore.